I had a call the other day from an Atlanta business owner interested in having us do a new website for him. In the conversation he asked me what was Pre-Website Design Consulting per our entry under our services. After I explained its value to him he decided to go ahead and have us do all of the pre-design groundwork and research for him prior to committing to a new website.

When I hung up with him I started thinking this would be a good topic for the blog so here goes.

Most business owners seeking a new website have not done very much upfront research on their niche and how it relates to the internet, they need a website and they want it fast. However understanding all that is possible concerning the different areas of your industry or niche and how they are already being presented via the web is probably one of the most important things to know before you think about a new business website.  This is in a nut shell the basis of pre-design consulting and a good beginning for building a brand new business site with the hopes of having it create new customers for you as well as the many additional benefits a website can bring to your business.

The largest determining and most important factor in having a successful website is without doubt the content of the site. Good well written original content is vital on more than one front and overall should be the most important consideration you have toward the building and the week to week upkeep of your website. Content carries not only your message to the visitor it also plays a huge role in the success of your Search Engine exposure and rankings. This makes the content of your pages a double edged sword that if done right can not only get visitors to your site but can turn those visitors into customers. I will break this out in two different descriptions below so hopefully you can better understand. This is a very brief article that will get you into the concept of how crucial it is for your site content to work for you. There are books full of great information out there that if you desire to know will teach you. I am always happy to help anyone find these resources if you ask.

Preface: Below are just a few simple things that anyone can do to improve their Search Engine exposure that do not require any special skills or knowledge. One of the great things about marketing yourself or business on the web is that unlike any other advertizing you have a choice on the web. You can either choose to pay someone like me to do these tasks or you can do many of them yourself and let your time take the place of your money. Either way the below items will help with your websites promotion and marketing in the Search Engines as well as others. If your website is fairly new I recommend you first concentrate on the local area and then build your marketing campaign out from there if you are seeking a larger geographic market.

1) Set up some Social Networking Accounts. Twitter, Facebook Fan Page, LinkedIn, Delicious and YouTube. There are many more so feel free to set up as many as you like. In each of these enter a brief description of your business and services and be sure to include your location and contact information. It is a smart idea to have your location in the first line of the description to allow the search engine to know where you are located as well as any viewers. Be sure to have a link to your site and make sure to use the same link format in all of the places. Example: http://www.yoursite.com or http://yoursite.com  Always when linking to your site either use the www or leave it off, do not mix them up as you want any page rank to all flow to the same URL.  Note, for my next blog I plan to expand on this topic so be sure to check back in a few days for more on basic Social Media uses as they can pertain to SEO. At the time I was writing this I came across this great brief on Social Media and its effect on relevance in search: http://on.mash.to/nuDT4l

If you have had a website up for any period of time past a year you are probably like me and receive at least 5-10 emails everyday offering to get you to the front page of Google or Search Engines. I even get emails offering to get my pages to the top page in Google for sites that are already on the top page for several keywords or phrases. Thank goodness for spam filters and boxes because that is where all of the emails I get on SEO go. When I first started out in the online world SEO was never talked about and then within a couple of years that is all you heard about. It is a very tangled web of good and bad all the way too fraudulent at times. The bottom line as I see it is that if you want to rank in the top of the search hierarchy then all you really need to do is spend some time getting some basic education on how and why it works. Then you just need to map out a plan and implement it over time and you will see some positive results.

Business Marketing and Promotion is the key to success in today’s market place and no place can do it better for less than the World Wide Web.The key like any business marketing campaign is first knowing what you are doing and then knowing how to get it done so it works for you not against you. As you have obviously already settled on the idea of investigating the possibility of promoting and marketing your business on the internet via a website we would like to have a chance to show you a better way to do so. An easy website promotional concept that will not only save you money but make you money with less headache and investment than you can find in most web development opportunities.

As a self employed entrepreneur of over 35 years in the Atlanta and North Georgia marketplace and the son of a now retired highly successful entrepreneur with more than 50 years of success in the Georgia Commercial Real-estate market I feel I am fairly qualified to speak on the subject of marketing in the Atlanta and North Georgia area. As a member of the Atlanta Georgia Residential Construction industry for my first 25 years of work history I was forced to learn all I could about promoting myself and my business if I was to succeed.